


Where once Twin Candles Burned

by Allegory



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Cancer, M/M, Old Age, RIP, Victor Dies, everyone dies, it's bittersweet without the sweet, yuuri dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 18:24:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9250121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allegory/pseuds/Allegory
Summary: Victor starts to spend more time in the hospital. He phones his relatives in Russia to take his apartment and everything in it because he won’t be going back.





	

Victor shuffles down the stairs with a candle in hand. He opens the shutters and a gust of wind blows towards him, almost putting out the flame. He pulls his coat around it, sheltering the flame until the wind subsides and all that’s left is the permanent silence of the Katsuki hot springs. Victor remembers chasing Yuuri down this hallway once, eager to become a great coach, to understand everything about his disciple.

He holds his candle up to the moon. A sickle hanging in the sky, joined by the orange glow, beads of melting wax. Victor blows the flame out.

 

It’s morning when Victor leaves the family home, Yuuri’s rucksack on his back. Spring in Japan is a sort of beauty that Victor can’t appreciate enough. The sight of cherry blossoms unfurling, when he and Yuuri held hands by a bridge near the quay. Victor walks across the bridge alone now. His chest burns, coldness tingling up his fingers.

The hospital is quiet when he arrives. He can’t quite read Japanese yet, but when he tugs on the stairwell door and it doesn’t relent, he sits on an adjacent bench. It takes half an hour before the workers permit visitors. Victor watches as a nurse unlocks the door, clearly enamored by him despite his sick complexion. She speaks and Victor replies with the only word he knows; silence.

 

Yuuri Katsuki lies on a hospital bed at the end of the ward. Pins and needles stick to Victor’s heart as he approaches, every step an infinitesimal distance. He feels no weight in his legs, as if there’s a magnetic force driving him towards his student. Yuuri glances at him and a brittle smile breaks on his face. It destroys Victor, makes him weak in the knees. He grabs a chair before he can fall. The gaunt cheeks on Yuuri’s face and the light snuffed out of his eyes where once twin candles burned, brighter than the sun, brighter than anything Victor had ever seen.

Victor is going to burst into tears. He does.

 

It has been a week since Yuuri was first put here and it feels like the first day each time Victor returns. Yuuri is so incapacitated that he can’t walk more than half a circle around his bed. He pees through a catheter and they force feed him through his nose because that’s the only way he’ll get some food, any food into his body. Victor laces his fleshy fingers between Yuuri’s thin bones and wishes the pain away for him, all of it, but they both know the only time that’ll happen is when Yuuri ceases to feel anything.

 

Before dawn one day, Victor stirs with something hard in his pants. Tears well in his eyes and he cries for an hour, maybe two, thinking of him and Yuuri before this had happened, of all the times they’d fought and made up and had sex that wasn’t really sex more than the press of Yuuri’s lips on his nape. Their love.

 

Victor starts to spend more time in the hospital. He phones his relatives in Russia to take his apartment and everything in it because he won’t be going back.

 

It’s finally over after Victor uses the hospital toilet one day, needing to splash himself awake. The monitor has gone still, Yuuri’s body rigid, his palms spread like claws. Victor can tell that his last moments were coiled in intense pain, not from the cancer but from Victor’s absence, Victor, Victor when he needed him the most.

 

Victor doesn’t remember what happened next.

 

He’s thought about killing himself. They gave him three bottles of pills to juggle, and they’d work well enough to end his life. Reunite with Yuuri.

He doesn’t.

 

Sixty years later, he dies a cruel death instead. Alone, in a shabby motel room where the hot springs hold too much for him to bear. It happens in a rocking chair, the sound of a sitcom in the background. In his left fist are two golden rings.

**Author's Note:**

> i had absolutely no reason to write this,


End file.
